Businesses use product development processes to create or modify their products. Product development requires coordination of several organizations in a business, such as operations, billing, engineering, sales, and customer support, to ensure that adequate resources and support are provided.
Unfortunately, coordination and administration of these organizations is difficult when developing products that involve services, such as telecommunications services. For example, known processes fail to identify when to engage the various organizations in a business as a product progresses through development. In addition, known processes fail to provide tools to these organizations, such as real-time on-line documentation associated with a product under development, templates for that documentation with on-line guidelines and definitions for completion, tracking reports for products under development, etc. Therefore, when a product is deployed, organizations in a business often cannot support the product.
Poor coordination and administration during product development leads to deployment problems and result in customer complaints or lost revenue. A business may also be forced to devote valuable resources (human and financial) to rework or correct these problems, Therefore, it would be desirable to provide systems, apparatus, and methods for developing a product, which overcome these and other shortcomings of known product development processes.